Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday November 29, 2007 @01:14PM
from the something-else-to-block dept.

Placid writes to alert us to a new channel opening up between advertisers and our eyeballs: PDFs with context-sensitive text ads. The service is called "Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo" and it goes into public beta today. The "ad-enabled" PDFs are served off of Adobe's servers. The article mentions viewing them in Acrobat or Reader but doesn't mention what happens when a non-Adobe PDF reader is used. The ads don't appear if the PDF is printed.

I remember sometime in the mid-90's when Yahoo claimed that they would never have banner ads on their search site (back then mostly what their site was), and then somewhere in their IPO frenzy, ended up doing it anyway. That's when Webcrawler came up and everybody thought Yahoo was over. Somewhere after that, Webcrawler faded into obscurity and this new upstart "Google" started becoming popular.I still find Google's services less cluttered and easier to navigate than Yahoo's. I hardly ever use Yahoo's prima

Yea. Based on this article, I discovered SumatraPDF, ideal for reading Ebooks, just 1MB, single executable, portable as hell, GPLed code, great stuff. But my recommendation also helps when you see services such as "IpodHelper", "gnotify" or "AppleUpdate" which you also don't want while wanting to keep, say, iTunes, or google notifier for a single user.

Further reading of the foxit site reveals
Commercial Usage
Generally Foxit PDF Reader is totally free for personal users worldwide for non-commercial use. But in commercial environment, we need you to send us answers to our questions listed below before we could respond to you.
Wonder why they would have those obvious pricing pages.....HMMM

You know that there are other free alternatives with GPL'd code that if Adobe would try to sue would only get around $50, and if suing worked so well, why do we still have DeCSS and other "illegal" technologies.

Well, it depends on who do you consider their customers are... I think that Yahoo and Google provide a service to the public, but their true customers (the ones paying for the services) are the advertisers...

Your comment is insightful, but doesn't apply to Adobe's current situation.

Yahoo and Google provide a service to the public, but their true customers (the ones paying for the services) are the advertisers...

Indeed, many people fail to realize that, when it comes to services supported by advertising, the public is the product, not the customer. This explains why companies may sometimes piss off the public despite the adage that "the customer is king."

However, Adobe has not been supported by ad revenue, at least not in a major way. They are now breaking into a new business model where they do have ad revenue, but that doesn't necessarily excuse any antagonization of the public just because "hey, now the public is the product, not the customer."

Many academic conferences now charge for their articles, and as a poor grad student, I would rather deal with some ads than pay for a subscription. Sure, my school usually pays for me through their library, but I'll often come across journals that my school doesn't subscribe to. I'd happily deal with an ad to gain the convenience of accessing them online. At least, I'd like to have that option.

Adobe gives Acrobat reader away for free. It charges money for its fancy publishing tools. So many of their paying customers are content creators that like getting paid . . . so yeah . . . I'll bet some of them actually asked for ads.

PDF is now a programmable display platform, not a publishing format. Its programmability is significant enough that it is a potential security threat to users, who view it as data, not as a potential executable. The extension to advertising is obvious. How else will this functionality be used?

This problem is no unique to pdf. The community swallowed the feature richness line and chose to ignore the old dictum, keep your data and your executables separate.

How would you like your XML? Would you like javascript as well? How about AJAX?

This is hardly a new problem. TeX and Postscript are both complete programming languages (indeed, PDF was meant to be just programming-language-free version of Postscript). Most word processors and necessarily all spreadsheets have programming languages built-in. If you want any degree of context-sensitivity, interaction or convenience, you pretty much need your text documents to have programming language support. Security needs to be achieved by limiting/carefully controlling network access or access to th

According to TFA, the ads will be in a separate panel in the reader, so we'll have our identical display and printed views.This is an option _publishers_ of content will have. I think it's a great idea, actually. I'm quite happy looking at a few ads to get the content of Slashdot, the NYT, Washington Post, Gmail, Google search, practically the whole subscription-free part of the internet. If this model allows some publishers to put out stuff for free that they previously charged for, I think that's great

> Why don't they just skip all this craziness and just ad-enable monitors.

I believe it has actually been tried - at the OS or video-driver level if I remember correctly.

My memory is vague and my googling poor but I seem to recall that it involved "reserving" X number of lines at the bottom or top of the screen which are "untouchable" and on which only ads would be served up. I seem to recall that it was in the mid to late nineties? Perhaps some other fossil around here remembers.

i think you're absolutely right. something that companies seem to be routinely missing lately is focusing on their core competency. adobe is (was) not in the business of making money from add revenue, yet here they are. well, what the gold mine they thought they found was actually a drastic miscalculation nearly assuring everyone uses a third party viewer application (depending on the severity of the annoyance) as i highly doubt they can effectively insert an add into a pdf document that has to display on o

I run a computer lab on a large university, and we already have more problems getting PDFs to print than any other format...so now they're going to muck up the spec even more?! Thanks soooooooooooooooooo much guys.

Explain how this is possible when the purpose of a pdf is to keep the original formatting of the document and be able to be printed and still retain that formatting. The ONLY problem I have ever encountered with pdf files is on a Lexmark printer where I had to set it to print pdfs as an image file. Other than that, no problems whatsoever.

For the record, my last job involved maintaining over 800 printers across the entire state with Lexmark and HP being the most common but also Xerox copiers/printers and Imagistic (ewwwww) multi-function machines thrown in.

My current job has 1/3 the number of printers yet we still encounter zero problems with pdf files.

If you have problems getting pdfs to print, there is something seriously wrong.

> If you have problems getting pdfs to print, there is something seriously wrong.

Bah, perhaps you have few problems getting vanilla PDFs to print from Windows. Try it from Linux. Acroread is a turd! xpdf opens almost every pdf we throw at it but since patrons expect acroread we keep it as the default in the patron lab. If (and I say IF) it is no certainty that it will print it. Ok, we aren't using HP printers anymore, and our Oki is not using an Adobe Postscript implemenation but we don't have many

Explain how this is possible when the purpose of a pdf is to keep the original formatting of the document and be able to be printed and still retain that formatting.

Because the "purpose" of PDF has nothing to do with how software actually uses it. Hell, even Adobe's own reader doesn't format pages exactly the same when you print, vs. what you see on screen -- the default is to scale the pages to account for the printer's unprintable margin area. Which is a STUPID DEFAULT, because most documents ALREADY

The problem isn't so much that PDFs don't print correctly, at least for us. The problem is they often don't print at all. Particularly on HP printers. The lights come on and blink for a bit, the screen says it's receiving data. But then the lights just go out and the job disappears. Sometimes the job will just print pages of raw postscript. Sometimes we get ghostscript interpreter errors. From the printer itself. HP doesn't want to pay licensing fees to Adobe for their engine, so HP printers all use

Really? Seriuosly? I've never had a problem printing a PDF in my life. I often use PDF when transporting documents from one place to another for printing, because things like changing the version of the word processor, or even just using a different printer with some word processors can have drastic results on how the document prints. When I went to get my self-designed wedding invitations printed, I brought the file on CD in about 4 different formats, and asked which ones they recommended I print from.

Spot on.I already use Foxit. It installs in the time it takes Adobe to load. If the ads are coming from Adobe's servers, then in theory the ads are in the reader. So get a different reader.

Adobe gives PDF a bad name, and that's saying something. Adobe, what do we hate about thee?

The invasive updater software. The amount of crap it puts on your Add/Remove Programs list in Windows (like every update). The other programs it nags you about installing whenever you update it (which is *way* too often if you

I'll say it again, Adobe sucks. Why does ANYONE even use it, regardless of ads? Same reason they use windows, I guess...it's sort of a default. Poor people. I hope they enjoy their ads and their sucky PDf reader.

I think Adobe is very smart to make this move; it'll make them lots of money for exactly the reason you cite here. Even though superior alternatives exist, the vast majority of people will continue to use Adobe's crappy PDF reader, and will see all these annoying ads.

That's mostly because the vast majority of people don't know there is an alternative. The big blue E is the Interweb. Adobe is to view the bank statement. Word is for typing letters.That's about as far as it goes.

That's exactly right, and that's why I don't see what's wrong with this. Adobe is just capitalizing on peoples' laziness and ignorance. If people don't like seeing ads in their bank statements, they shouldn't use Adobe's reader, but if they're too lazy to seek out an alternative with a simple Goo

Your point is, of course, correct. It's up to end-users as to what they will accept or not. I just don't get what is so wrong with making your hundred millions or so and continuing to make cool products.

Oh, that's easy. Investors don't want you to just make "enough" money and make cool products; they want constant year-after-year growth in the stock price that's greater than the rest of the market. It's not enough to just have a strong, stable company making widgets, with happy well-paid employees, smooth

I'm a big fan of the Foxit Reader - it's much less bulky and intrusive than the Adobe reader.

My only gripe is their lack of a plugin for Firefox. Many of the PDFs that I encounter are online, and it's more convenient (for me, at least) to view them inside of the browser instead of launching the program externally.

Of course, given recent events [slashdot.org], no plugins may be a good thing...

dynamic ads require a source of data to work and that means they can probably be disabled by blacklisting the source servers, either that or they will actually start embedding ads into the PDFs themselves as "static content" that nothing short of aditing the PDF manually will solve.

Google realizes that it cannot make money through advertising indefinately... so what does it do, it researches new ides to an extreme previously unheard of. Their ads are lightwight and unobtrusive. Essentially they are ad funded, but overall they are good to their users/customers.

Yahoo, who doesn't seem to get it, simply finds ways to put ads where they haven't been before. Great for the ad revenue, bad for their users.

Is there really anyone who hasn't figured out why Google is such a majority favorite? If not for google, I suspect that flash based ads would still be the standard, and everyone would be experiementing with streaming video ads or some crap like that. Thank god google came along and showed their competition that the business model doesn't require large, annoying ads, but instead a huge volume of well placed ads that appeal instead of repel the user!

If yahoo wan't ad's in PDF's, so be it... all the more reason for me to stick with google.

xpdf does the job just fine for me, now. are you happy, adobe? (I am!)

what is this going to do to corp america that often does NOT want anyone outside the company knowing that person A opened doc B? much less having outbound and inbound packets eat up your corp network b/w.

bright idea (not!).

then again, people DO seem to be running acroread (win or other version) and so maybe they just don't CARE that scripting and 'active things' happen just because they opened a doc.

Or better yet, how bout I use Open Office and get ad-free documents?Somehow I don't see a professional document being very professional if adverts are included.'So you see the fiscal outlook for this quarter were much larger than previous quarters this can be -what the?! Oh uhh, sorry folks, you'll have to bear with me. I clicked 'larger' and I'm being re-directed to a penis enlargement website. If everybody would please avert their eyes from the screen and maybe look at the non ad-laced budget forecast pri

I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't work in Preview in OS X. At least for a while 'til Apple can get revenue from it. Preview, for those not familiar with it, basically renders Adobe Reader pointless on a Mac, especially because it is about ten times faster than Reader. So for stuff that doesn't require Acrobat Pro, Preview rules.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't work in Preview in OS X. At least for a while 'til Apple can get revenue from it. Preview, for those not familiar with it, basically renders Adobe Reader pointless on a Mac, especially because it is about ten times faster than Reader. So for stuff that doesn't require Acrobat Pro, Preview rules.

Indeed, and the lack of the flashing ads that the Adobe reader has stupidly added to the reader is another huge boost for Preview and another hint that this insane scheme won't affect the Mac community.

I was wondering how Adobe could kill Acrobat -- this new Advertisement scheme just might do it. And I mean the application -- not the PDF file format. Other than editing text -- which occasionally works, I haven't found much useful in that expensive "Pro" app. I've used the "Optimize PDF" which seems to bloat most files after a reasonable amount of time.

I've changed to Preview from Acrobat for viewing PDFs. If Apple is smart, they would announce "Preview for Windows." Put another notch in that halo.

The exception, unfortunately, is if you run across any DRM-encumbered PDF. Preview cannot display those; the only reason to have Reader around, as far as I can tell, is for those very rare situations where you have a DRM-encumbered PDF to view.

While it's true that clickable links won't work, to say that "Preview also prints pdfs badly" is completely false. Preview prints PDFs just fine. Of course if you have a five year old Mac with hardly any RAM, running 10.3.x and a crappy printer, your results may vary.

You mean you didn't test your files before releasing them? You didn't think that most Mac users would be using Preview?/bogglePreview is not intended to be a full-featured replacement for Acrobat. It is intended to be a simple, fast, no-nonesense PDF viewer. It excels at the purpose for which it is intended. Of course there is still a place for Acrobat when dealing with complex documents, but to have a quick look at a PDF, or quickly turn a PostScript file into a PDF, or for viewing/printing/exporting

Then your company is doing something really wrong with the PDFs you are making, because I've never had any problem with PDFs on my Mac (yes, with Preview and also that new "Quick Look" thing in Leopard, not sure what it's called).

Awesome! I was wondering how Adobe was going to make Acrobat Reader even more of a bloated monstrosity than it already is. What a better way to expand its memory footprint than to integrate some kind of ad management function. I hope they use Flash ads for this. I can smell the sweet aroma of burning RAM already!

I hate PDFs. Every time I wind up having to open one of these things in a browser it just sucks. They load up slow. If they're large then I often times cannot even page forward. They're very laggy, and sometimes just plain lock up. The frustration with trying to read a PDF is already huge for me. I see this behavior on Windows and Mac boxes, and with various browsers as well, and it's not like I'm using ancient machines. Maybe other people have had different experiences? What am I missing here? PDF just seems broken to me already.

Anyway, now they want to add ads to these things? I really don't know what to say. I already consider PDFs to be on the verge of being totally unusable. This should push them right over the edge.

The problem isn't with PDF in itself. PDF is perceived as a problem for two reasons:

1) Adobe Acrobat. Get rid of it, for goodness sake. Use something else. PDF isn't slow, Adobe's crappy reader is slow.2) Web developers cannot resist putting TPPs on websites. What's a TPP, you ask? A Totally Pointless PDF. People: if you have a website, there's one way to get me to NEVER read your content. How? By putting it in PDF. The ONE exception is this: if you have a book or reference manual, then that is an appropriate use of PDF. But tell me that I am downloading a PDF. Don't disguise your PDF as another web page by just putting it behind a normal link. When I click a link, unless I am warned that it's a PDF, I expect an HTML page. PDF just interrupts the flow of the web. Don't believe me? The just google usability and PDF. You'll get lots of stuff like this: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html [useit.com].

PDF is like other overused "web" technologies like flash: useful when used properly, and annoying as hell when overused.

As other people said: do not use Acrobat reader. Especially do not use Acrobat Reader on Windows (the Linux version is somewhat less bloated).Also,do not open PDFs in the browser, open them in a PDF reader. One simple browser setting change and PDFs will be a LOT more usable.

The last time I saw the default PDF readers on Mac and Gnome systems, they were fast and had a good interface. I use KPDF (the default reader for KDE) and it is a lot better than reading a Word document - although not as good for readin

They do work a lot better when you segregate them from the browser.In firefox on windows, drill down through: Tools|options|content(tab)|manage...(button) Search (or scroll) for PDF and choose Change action. Then change it to open in acrobat reader (or whatever else you use) instead of the plugin.

It really annoys me that the default setting is to pretend it's a web page. Especially as the widgets don't map very well: you can't print from the browser's print, you have to print from the plugin, little thi

Every time I wind up having to open one of these things in a browser it just sucks. They load up slow. If they're large then I often times cannot even page forward. Maybe other people have had different experiences? What am I missing here? PDF just seems broken to me already.

Don't use any browser for viewing PDFs over ten pages. Save the PDF to the local drive, close the browser, and open the local copy.

Acrobat Reader as a browser plugin does not load the entire pdf, only the current page. As you scr

PDF as an idea isn't bad. Sure, a lot of forms need to be preserved as close to the original as possible.

But, PDFs are heavily overused for information that can be better transmitted in more compact forms. For example, how many websites have documents that ought to be in a wiki format (not necessarily editable by the public) and instead are just saved as a series of gigantic PDF files? Some companies are absolutely addicted to putting everything in PDF.

Most people aren't fond of PDF because Adobe's Reader is so bloated and slow. This has zero to do with PDF the format, and everything to do with Adobe's software. I don't mind PDFs at all because they load extremely quickly on my system.As for overuse, it depends on how you intend to use the information. If it's meant to be viewed on the web only, then PDF really isn't the best format: what looks good on a printed page doesn't necessarily look good on a monitor. A wiki format is definitely better for ma

The format isn't bloated and shitty (it's a subset of PostScript), it's Adobe's reader that's bloated and shitty, and they want to make it as shitty as possible. There are alternatives out there, like FoxIt [foxitsoftware.com].

PDF as a format isn't going anywhere, since it's becoming the de facto standard format in the print industry.

I think it is a pretty decent idea. From the context it is talking about only PDFs created with a certain version of the software rather than regular adobe pro, which means you wouldn't use it for creating professional office documents, but distributable publications. It also makes some mention of the publisher being able to profit from it, this would be a cool way for someone to make a career of writing and distributing content without charging for it or hosting it on a server. They just wrap the content

I know this is/., so yeah, we all hate ads... There is a possible upside though.I'm a grad student, I do a lot of research for my classes online, and 90% of the papers I read are in PDF format. For the benefit being able to download these papers, I pay an annual fee for membership in IEEE & ACM to access their digital libraries. If they (ACM/IEEE) could recover their fees through showing ads in the pdfs, maybe I could forgo paying their membership fees and opt instead to download the ad-laden versio

I don't necessarily want content for free. I do want manuals for items I buy to be available from your website for free. I happen to also want these without have to hand over my life history. I am entirely okay with paying for your service, product, and content when the quality is worth the price you want to charge. Being smothered in ads and other marketing doesn't actually help you get my money when I have a choice in whe

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

The Future Of AdvertisingWhile walking down the street 'security' cameras will perform face recognition on everybody walking by. The 'search space' problem will be solved by tracking you all day long, so it is a relatively small problem compared to recognizing a random face. Installed during the terrorism craze in the beginning of the century they now serve a different master. Once tracked you stay tracked. Then the advertising kicks in, small, weak laser based units will beam targeted advertising straight

How long until the first page of TI's latest chip spec gets inserted with an ad while downloading?

If they're gonna imbed advertising in the Virtual Machine [like the PDF* reader, or, God forbid, the Java/CLR/VMware VM's], then how long before some wiseass says, "Hey, let's embed the advertising stream in the silicon?"

[*I read somewhere that - while PostScript is Turing-complete - PDF is not Turing-complete.]

This reminds me of the Bill Hick's bit on advertisers.. do a search in youtube and you'll find it. They really are turning into Satan's Little Helpers.

Seriously, do we really need more ads on EVERYTHING?? I understand the need to get a product's info out into the brain's of all americans, but there is something to be said of plastering them everywhere that has the space.

At least there's always a way to block electronic ads. The meatspace ads are the ones that really tick me off.

If I'm faced with the choice between 2 products, I think about their advertising. If I can remember advertising for one product and not the other, I buy the other. If I remember ads for both products, I buy one that annoys me less.

I don't need ads to tell me that there's something new out there. I don't care if there's something new out there. I care if there's something I need. If I need it, I already know I need it, and can find it on my own.

Also, I think ads in PDF's are a bad idea. PDF's load too slowly as it is.

Correction: Adobe's Reader loads too slowly. The horrific meltdown which occurs when you open a PDF is not PDF's fault, but the software which processes it. PDF itself is a relatively simple data format, although it specifies a lot of features. If you are content to simply read well-formatted text and graphics, you could try a different reader like FoxIt or a free option like xpdf. You'll find that PDF is not a bloated, slow forma